3 Overlooked Factors when Designing a Datacenter

Designing the perfect datacenter is an epic trial. With so many factors to consider, many are overlooked – here are three to consider.

1. Scalability is king

Death, taxes and increased storage capacity demands are the three certainties in life. Corporate data storage demands are increasing at a frightening rate and any new datacenter needs to not only acknowledge this fact, but be designed to accommodate it.

New datacenter deployments need to be both modular and scalable to ensure maximum return on investment and longevity. From the physical outlay of every rack, to the power and cooling provisions, ensure that everything has been built with “more” in mind – more appliances, more racks, more capacity. And the easier you can scale, the better.

2. Power consumption is not clear cut

Every item installed in your new datacenter will have a projected power consumption value, providing a handy reference when trying to plan power distribution and feeds. Yet these figures are often best-case estimates calculated when a unit is installed in isolation, rather than a real-world deployment.

As far as possible you should try to build a datacenter using the actual power consumption values to better plan deployments for load balancing and resilience. This is much easier when migrating existing assets, so make sure plans contain at least these “real” values.

3. There are other ways to expand capacity

Datacenter capacity planning is often undertaken in terms of physical appliance sizes, rather than how existing assets are being used. Before building a new datacenter it is important to consider whether appliances are being used to capacity – it is always far cheaper to populate all the arrays of a storage appliance than it is to purchase another appliance.

It also makes good business sense to see how existing legacy hardware can be pushed back into action for lower priority computing functions like archiving. Even if you do go ahead and build a new datacenter, properly supported post-warranty hardware can provide additional capacity and help to reduce the cost of the overall new deployment.

For further help and advice on designing a new datacenter than combines legacy hardware with newer counterparts, get in touch with CDS’ team of deployment experts today.